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Well, I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to get it without one, but I'm in no big hurry to spoil the fun, so I'm willing to wait until nobody else has found it for a couple of weeks...

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by Marky:

quote:
Originally posted by SuperGenius:

Maybe I should take up quilting. icon_frown.gif


You say that like it's a bad thing! icon_wink.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"


 

It's not a bad thing I just planned on quilting when I could no longer walk, but I guess at that point in time I could no longer see either. icon_eek.gif

 

Pepper

 

Horizontals where it's at!

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

_ The Big Picture _

 

If nobody has made any more progress, I will add another hint Friday morning. Rat, you should pay attention: this one should be right up your alley.

 

Oops. An inadvertent hint... icon_wink.gif

 


 

I hate that when I'm expected to solve every cipher there is. This is obviously some kind of steganography. There is stego algorithm known as F5 which uses a key. Hint hint not the F5 key on the keyboard. But I've been searching all night and can't find an F5 download that runs on my machine. All the freeware I've found has been in Java and I don't know how to get Java to run. I keep getting error messages that no class has been defined. I found one Windows executable that only encrypts, not decrypts, and is written in German. I got it to open the jpg, but it was expecting me to give it text and a key to ecrypt something INTO it. If someone can just tell me how to get F5 to run I think this thing might be pretty easy to break. The second part of the hint could be the key ... or lead to it.

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

quote:
Originally posted by The Rat:

I hate that when I'm expected to solve every cipher there is.


 

I'm sorry if you felt pressured. That was never my intent.


 

I never feel pressured. This is fun stuff. I have the solution to BP and I did not use the F5 Java program. Sorry to have caused any confusion out there.

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Well, apparently there's a publically posted major spoiler somewhere that makes BP a 3 difficulty. I don't see it. I'd already found the F5/Steganography link on one of my first google searches, but not having a Java compiler (that's special equipment, right?) combined with Team Jiffy's comments made me decide that was a dead end. I've pored for over an hour going through the hex dump of the file, but that hasn't gotten me anywhere either. Actually, I haven't looked at the cache at all today because I finally had a chance to get outside today, apparently being the last of the local FTF crew to try to hunt for Dig 'Em.

 

--

I'm off in my own little world. That's okay, people know me here.

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Was I the only one in the bay with a crazy gps today? At around 10 am I started walking toward a cache, looked down at the gps, and it said I was off the coast of Santa Cruz. I looked up and noticed the power lines and just figured that was the problem, rebooted the gps and it was fine. Found the cache and then started to drive to the next cache.

 

For the 1/2 hour to an hour, the gps was just going crazy, one second I was on Hwy 99 the next I was south of San Jose, the next I was back on 880, with an occasioinal trip to the ocean. ?????

 

Sun spots? UFO's? Earthquake resonance? Magic?

 

I almost turned around and ended my day of geocaching.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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quote:
Originally posted by kablooey:

http://sftreasurehunt.com

 

Anybody interested in doing this? Saturday 2/15.

Early registration pricing $30/person ends 2/6.

bthomas posted a link on some cache. They have three divisions and teams of 4-8 or so players. I'd think a group of some of us Bay Area geocachers might do well at this.

 

--

I'm off in my own little world. That's okay, people know me here.


 

Are you seriously thinking about doing it?

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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We were in Madera, Merced and Gustine placing caches - didn't notice it - although we'd hate to find our coordinates were off! icon_frown.gif However, the local copy of StreetAtlas on my PC seemed to indicate the coordinates we obtained were reasonable...

 

quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

Was I the only one in the bay with a crazy gps today? At around 10 am I started walking toward a cache, looked down at the gps, and it said I was off the coast of Santa Cruz. I looked up and noticed the power lines and just figured that was the problem, rebooted the gps and it was fine. Found the cache and then started to drive to the next cache.

 

For the 1/2 hour to an hour, the gps was just going crazy, one second I was on Hwy 99 the next I was south of San Jose, the next I was back on 880, with an occasioinal trip to the ocean. ?????

 

Sun spots? UFO's? Earthquake resonance? Magic?

 

I almost turned around and ended my day of geocaching.

 

george

 

http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.


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Mars is being a pain in the butt.

 

First, we ran out of daylight yesterday. Second, we run out of daylight today, and in trying to find a spot for the cache at night we somehow managed to lose our GPS V!!

 

PHOOEY! We wanted to get the Solar System done today... F. attributes the slowness (only 3 placed today, 5 yesterday) to the fact that but for the first two, we really didn't know the towns all that well, but it seemed that everything moved in slow motion today....

 

By the way - the "Comet Cache" will not be coming out in a while... probably not until next week-end or so.. we are still trying to get the ammo cannister to not smell so much... and we want to put a decent first finder's prize in there...

 

Also, even if you find all 9 planets, you won't be able to find Comet Cache without adding in an offset that will be given on the Comet Cache cache-page... the reason being that we have to place the comet cache LAST, and had to put something on the log sheets in the meantime... the pages do point somewhere, but more as a slightly humorous aside than anything else...

 

-J

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Went caching in Pleasanton today.

Wow, I hit the motherlode. We got a late start so we didn't get to the first cache until 2:00, then found 9 by 6:00 and only one virtual, no locationless.

We barely scratched the surface of that town. We're heading back next weekend to continue the harvest.

Did Altoids sponsor Geocaching in that town? Will all of those magnets effect compasses in town?

Lovely town too, I think that I know where I'll be moving next.

Mickey

 

Mickey

Max Entropy

More than just a name, a lifestyle.

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quote:
Originally posted by TeamJiffy:

Mars is being a pain in the butt.

 

First, we ran out of daylight yesterday. Second, we run out of daylight today, and in trying to find a spot for the cache at _night_ we somehow managed to lose our GPS V!!

 


 

Maybe Mars has your GPS V hostage! Seriously, I hope that you found it! icon_eek.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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There has been some discussion about the difficulty of Big Picture, and whether special equipment is needed or not.

 

All that is required to solve BP is a computer with a standard browser that includes a Java Virtual Machine. Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla all have JVMs.

 

Additionally, a JVM can be downloaded from Sun; they call it the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE.

 

The key to getting The Big Picture to work is paying close attention to software versions, and avoiding any beta software. That's what the last part of the hint means.

 

Before I put it out, I tested it on a Macintosh, a Linux machine, and of course on Windows. It worked fine all three places.

 

[This message was edited by fizzymagic on February 03, 2003 at 10:12 AM.]

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News ALERT! Pepper & Co.(twins) found 4 yes I said 4 caches Sunday, things are looking up.

Little Lila said Mom maybe we are getting the hang of it up here. Maybe we are I'm just not that positive yet.

 

I got an email about the quakes from hotfoot and maybe that's what your problem was George, any way I got a belly laugh out of your post.

 

It must have been a beautiful day yesterday alot of my caches were hit. DOHHH it's still wet and cold up here.

 

Pepper

Well i'm off to bed.

 

Horizontals where it's at!

 

[This message was edited by SuperGenius on February 03, 2003 at 11:54 AM.]

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

There has been some discussion about the difficulty of Big Picture, and whether special equipment is needed or not.

 

All that is required to solve BP is a computer with a standard browser that includes a Java Virtual Machine. Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla all have JVMs.

 

Additionally, a JVM can be downloaded from Sun; they call it the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE.

 

The key to getting The Big Picture to work is paying close attention to software versions, and avoiding any beta software. That's what the last part of the hint means.

 

Before I put it out, I tested it on a Macintosh, a Linux machine, and of course on Windows. It worked fine all three places.


Now don't take this as a complaint. You can even take it as a compliment for creating a difficult cache. I consider myself to be very computer savy, and am a programmer by trade, but after knowing the 'spoiler', haven't been able to solve it even though I spent about two hours trying to get various different programs to run. I would guess that this cache is beyond 95% of the caching population unless, at some time, you post specific instructions how to install and run the software you tested. Then it will just be beyond 90%. icon_wink.gif Again, I'm not complaining at all, and think its a pretty cool thing. Never even heard about this kind of data hiding before (and would never have gotten it without the spoiler hint). Well done, and keep up the challenging caches. If there weren't difficult caches, this sport would get boring fast. icon_biggrin.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

Good job on Marky cracking the top 25. Trying to see how long I can hold on to me state lead before I end up chasing Marky.


I think you guys are doing a fine job of keeping ahead of us! icon_wink.gif That's cool that we made it onto the leaderboard page! Now, if we just spent some time hiding caches as well. In the cache mobile, there are 100+ caches ready to be placed, but we only ended up placing one this weekend. I need to place some more by work, I think. Maybe a puzzle cache. icon_cool.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by SuperGenius:

It must have been a beautiful day yesterday alot of my caches were hit. DOHHH it's still wet and cold up here.


You don't even want to know how nice it was here this weekend. icon_wink.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by SuperGenius:

News ALERT! Pepper & Co.(twins) found 4 yes I said 4 caches Sunday, things are looking up.

Little Lila said Mom maybe we are getting the hang of it up here. Maybe we are I'm just not that positive yet.


 

Fill us in Pepper, what is the deal with these North West caches.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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Mary, the kids and I went for this cache yesterday during our visit to the South Bay and ended up staying a lot longer than we expected. It was a hard cache, but after that we just enjoyed playing checkers and giant chess. I think the kids felt like they were in a harry potter movie, moving the giant pieces across the board.

 

We also got to meet Barefoot and Twinkle. It's always funny when you're trying NOT to be noticed, looking for a public cache when other geocachers spot you. It was a tough find.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

We also got to meet Barefoot and Twinkle. It's always funny when you're trying NOT to be noticed, looking for a public cache when other geocachers spot you. It was a tough find.


Yeah, that was a tough one (just look at the early, pre-FTF logs!). It's hard to look inconspicuous to another geocacher, and it's really the geomuggles that you are trying to fool anyway. icon_wink.gif Sounds like you had fun. Joani and I spent way too much money there during the early DNFs. icon_rolleyes.gif Lots of interesting stores and food.

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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Yay! F. insisted (good for her!) that we go back and search again, and she found it! Talk about a needle in a haystack!! The poor little thing was still sitting there, looking forlornly into space...... I put my ear up close to it, and could hear it say, through it's muffled sniffles and drying tears (it was all damp and probably caught a horrible cold), "Hey! I kept on saying *precisely* where I was! Why couldn't you *hear* me before now?!"

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

Hey! I didn't realize there were pictures of the thing! I need a new color handspring so I can download the photos and make them useful.


Now that would be pretty sweet! JPGs on the color visor look amazingly good. icon_wink.gif Of course, you'd need some way of automatically DLing the images. (I guess AvantGo does this, so that would be no problem if that is what you are using). Does Plucker do that as well?

 

--Marky

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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I knew it was coming but I thought it was wednesday. Today is my one year anniversary of geocaching. One year ago today I found this cache... I Hate I-5 Just a Little Bit

 

One year and 778 caches later, here I am.

 

Back then there were a little over 600 caches within 100 miles of Patterson, today 1875.

 

In that time I've seen the I've seen the sport and the web site both evolve. I've seen the site add the ability to disable caches, memberships and members only caches, pocket querries, benchmark hunting.

 

I've seen cachers come and then just disapear. I've met dozens of cachers found dozens of new parks, learned the back way to every part of the state and overall I've had a lot of fun.

 

I'm think I'm about to ready to shift into a more adventurous type of geocaching. I'm looking for long distance or difficult to get to caches. I had so much fun grabbing the Mississippi Lake caches and almost getting stuck in the hills in the cold and in the dark that I'm looking for more of the same.

 

This is not to say that I will be skipping anyother cache I happen to be near. I'm just looking forward to this summer so I can get into the Sierra to hunt and plant some backwoods geocaches.

 

I might need some back up so don't be surprised if I make a call for volunteers. I passed up a chance to get some in the Emigrant Wilderness last summer. Not this summer.

 

Here's to another year!

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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That is an amazing feat in a year. Think of the places you would never have known about without the "guidance" of some others. Even though I was raised on the mean streets of Sunnyvale, I have discovered new parks and such within a few miles of my house. As I get into this more I am now feeling like I could place a few caches in formerly "secret" places. I like the change in the feeling when we get within 200ft of a cache, the hike just got serious when we got that close.

 

I look forward to the innovation of 'ol pros like you and newbies that are yet to buy their first receiver.

 

Long distance caches are fun, I did a few in So. Cal on business and look forward to ones in Singapore when I go there next month. Geocaching makes it tolerable to travel on business now. Travelling the world is less interesting from the inside of a cleanroom.

 

Again, Congrats, you da MAN

 

Monty

 

"Vince Malum Patientia"

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The tougher caches definitely can be more memorable, and give you that feeling of accomplishment. The caches in Sierra Azul (above Lexington Reservoir) aren't quite as challenging as Mississippi Lake, but I think you will find them enjoyable, especially biking them (Sombroso Spur you can't get to by bike because the last .5 miles is overgrown, but you can with all the others). If you want to make it challenging, you can ride to Bald Mountain Cache from El Sombroso. icon_smile.gif

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

quote:
Originally posted by kablooey:

http://sftreasurehunt.com

 

Anybody interested in doing this? Saturday 2/15.

Early registration pricing $30/person ends 2/6.

bthomas posted a link on some cache. They have three divisions and teams of 4-8 or so players. I'd think a group of some of us Bay Area geocachers might do well at this.


 

Are you seriously thinking about doing it?

 

george


 

Well, if a couple of you wanted to try it, I'd be game. It didn't seem as if anybody else had any interest yet, though.

 

--

I'm off in my own little world. That's okay, people know me here.

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

All that is required to solve BP is a computer with a standard browser that includes a Java Virtual Machine. Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla all have JVMs.

 

Additionally, a JVM can be downloaded from Sun; they call it the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE.

 

The key to getting The Big Picture to work is paying close attention to software versions, and avoiding any beta software. That's what the last part of the hint means.

 

Before I put it out, I tested it on a Macintosh, a Linux machine, and of course on Windows. It worked fine all three places.


 

A couple of things you may be confused about. I certainly have nothing against the cache itself. I think it's a great cache. I'd heard of the technology, though this is my first time seeing it in action and because of artifacts in the image display, my initial attempts at solving the cache involved trying to find plaintext in the binary output.

 

That said, I think I have to believe that Marky's estimates may be conservative. I've worked as a programmer and for a JPEG company. But my experience isn't broad enough to know the difference between a Java compiler and a JVM, nor how to access the one hidden in my web browser.

 

--

I'm off in my own little world. That's okay, people know me here.

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Congraultions on so many finds in your first year of caching! Marky's suggestions of the Sierra Azule is good - I've (J) been up that way in the past (pre-caching) and the three up on St. Josephs Hill nearby (Under the High Wire, Ry's Lexie, Stake Me) are fun to find.

 

-TJ

 

[This message was edited by TeamJiffy on February 04, 2003 at 05:59 AM.]

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quote:
Originally posted by fizzymagic:

quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

I wasn't in this one. But do you recongnize who was?


 

Yes. Furthermore, I'll bet I am the _only_ person here who can identify _all_ the people in the photos you showed!


 

If i'm not mistaken that pretty girl with Jim is your niece.

 

George and Mary happy one year!

 

Pepper

 

Horizontals where it's at!

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quote:
Originally posted by montythemule:

Oh my, George, did you do all of those on your bike?

 

Whoa!

 

Monty

 

"Vince Malum Patientia"


I must admit that the bike gives a longer range than most of you bipeds. I can easily cover 16-20 miles of hiking trails in about 3 hours. Plus, it's just a blast.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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You know, I did a few caches in the south bay/ Los Gatos area on sunday and I have to say that Marky and Joani make the best micro logs around. I'm constantly impressed how they're always well put together and I've never found one in poor condition (unlike my own). Good job guys.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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quote:
Originally posted by georgeandmary:

...I have to say that Marky and Joani make the best micro logs around. I'm constantly impressed how they're always well put together and I've never found one in poor condition (unlike my own). Good job guys.


I'd love to take some of the credit, but Joani is the one who makes those up. icon_smile.gif We went by Old Blue Eyes and replaced the log on that one. We were surprised that there was enough space on those log sheets for comments. That was pretty cool for such a small log book. We had fun reading the comments. icon_smile.gif

 

Regarding comments George, there was a comment you wrote in one of the log books in a Petaluma cache that just had me rolling in the dirt laughing. Way too funny.

 

--Marky

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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Kablooey mentions pictures often in his logs and I haven't figured out how they help. I have been using Terra Server Advanced Search where you enter the coordinates and it finds an aerial map but there isn't any target or reference point for the entered coords so I find the whole thing pretty confusing. Even when I can find some identifiable feature I doesn't usually help any. What am I missing?

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I've used lost outdoors and the pics and coords match up really well. I had placed two micros in Augora hills at the beginning of the year and before I got home the gps crashed and I lost the coords.

 

I used a the photos and street maps to get some rough coordinates and some Souther Cal cachers found the caches for me and emailed me the coords.

 

I've read the ExpertGPS lets you overlay tracks and waypoints onto photos and scans of maps. I've been tempted to order it.

 

george

 

39570_500.jpg

Pedal until your legs cramp up and then pedal some more.

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